The present invention relates to spatial light modulators (light valves), and, more particularly, to spatial light modulators with pixels formed of electrostatically deflectable beams.
Spatial light modulators (SLM) are transducers that modulate incident light in a spatial pattern corresponding to an electrical or optical input. The incident light may be modulated in its phase, intensity, polarization, or direction, and the light modulation may be achieved by a variety of materials exhibiting various electrooptic or magnetooptic effects and by materials that modulate light by surface deformation. SLMs have found numerous applications in the areas of optical information processing, projection displays, and electrostatic printing. See references cited in L. Hornbeck, 128.times.128 Deformable Mirror Device, 30 IEEE Tran. Elec. Dev. 539 (1983). In particular, phase-only filtering operations are used for image correlation as described in J. Horner et al, Phase-Only Matched Filtering, 23 Appl. Opt. 812 (1984) and J. Horner et al, Two-Bit Correlation, 24 Appl. Opt. 1889 (1985).
An SLM type which may be fabricated in both one and two dimensional arrays is the deformable mirror. Deformable mirrors may be subdivided into three classes: elastomers, membranes, and cantilever beams. In the elastomer approach a metallized elastomer is addressed by a spatially varying voltage that produces surface deformation through compression of the elastomer. Because of the address voltage requirements in the order of one or two hundred volts, the elastomer is not a good candidate for integration with a high-density silicon address circuit. See, generally, A. Lakatos and R. Bergen, TV projection display using an amorphous-Se-type RUTICON light valve, 24 IEEE Tran. Elec. Dev. 930 (1977).
Membrane deformable mirrors come in a variety of types. One type is essentially a substitute for the oil film of the Eidophor system discussed above. In this system a thin reflective membrane is mounted to the faceplate of a cathode ray tube (CRT) by means of a support grid structure. Addressing is by a raster scanned electron beam as with the Eidophor. The charge deposited on the glass face-plate of the CRT by the electron beam electrostatically attracts the membrane which is held at a constant voltage. This attractive force causes the membrane to sag into the well formed by the grid structure, thereby forming a miniature spherical mirror at each modulated pixel location. The light diffracted from this type of modulated pixel is concentrated into a relatively narrow cone that is rotationally symmetric about the specularly reflected beam. This type of light valve is thus used with a schlieren stop that consists of a single central obscuration positioned and sized so as to block the image of the light source that is formed by the optical system after specular reflection from unmodulated areas of the light valve. Modulated pixels give rise to a circular patch of light at the schlieren stop plane that is larger than the central obscuration, but centered on it. The stop efficiency, or fraction of the modulated pixel energy that clears the schlieren stop, is generally somewhat lower for projectors based on deformable membranes than it is for the oil film Eidophor projector. Further, such membrane deformable mirror systems have at least two major problems. High voltages are required for addressing the relatively stiff reflective membrane, and slight misalignments between the electron beam raster and the pixel support grid structure lead to addressing problems. Such misalignments would cause image blurring and nonuniformity in display brightness.
Another type of membrane deformable mirror is described in L. Hornbeck, 30 IEEE Tran. Elec. Dev. 539 (1983) and U.S. Pat. No. 4,441,791 and is a hybrid integrated circuit consisting of an array of metallized polymer mirrors bonded to a silicon address circuit. The underlying analog address circuit, which is separated by an air gap from the mirror elements, causes the array of mirrors to be displaced in selected pixels by electrostatic attraction. The resultant two-dimensional displacement pattern yields a corresponding phase modulation pattern for reflected light. This pattern may be converted into analog intensity variations by schlieren projection techniques or used as the input transducer for an optical information processor. However, the membrane deformable mirror has manufacturability problems due to the susceptibility to defects that result when even small, micron sized particles are trapped between the membrane and the underlying support structure. The membrane would form a tent over these trapped particles, and the lateral extent of such tents is much larger than the size of the particle itself, and these tents would in turn be imaged as bright spots by a schlieren imaging system.
A cantilever beam deformable mirror is michromechanical array of deformable cantilever beams which can be electrostatically and individually deformed by some address means to modulate incident light in a linear or areal pattern. Used in conjunction with the proper projection optics, a cantilever beam deformable mirror can be employed for displays, optical information processing, and electrophotographic printing. An early version with metal cantilever beams fabricated on glass by vacuum evaporation appears in U.S. Pat. No. 3,600,798. This device has fabrication problems which include the alignment of the front and back glass substrates arising from the device's nonintegrated architecture.
A cantilever beam deformable mirror device is described in R. Thomas et al, The Mirror-Matrix Tube: A Novel Light Valve for Projection Displays, 22 IEEE Tran. Elec. Dev. 765 (1975) and U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,886,310 and 3,896,338. This device is fabricated as follows: a thermal silicon dioxide layer is grown on a silicon on sapphire substrate; the oxide is patterned in a cloverleaf array of four cantilever beams joined in the middle. The silicon is isotropically wet etched until the oxide is undercut, leaving within each pixel four oxide cantilever beams supported by a central silicon support post. The cloverleaf array is then metallized with aluminum for reflectivity. The aluminum which is deposited on the sapphire substrate forms a reference grid electrode which is held at a DC bias. The device is addressed by a scanning electron beam which deposits a charge pattern on the cloverleaf beams causing the beams to be deformed by electrostatic attraction towards the reference grid. Erasure is achieved by negatively biasing a closely spaced external grid and flooding the device with low-energy electrons. A schlieren projector is used to convert the beam deformation into brightness variations at the projection screen. A significant feature of this device is the cloverleaf geometry which leads to beam deflection in a direction rotated forty-five degrees from the openings between the beams; this permits use of a simple cross shaped schlieren stop to block out the fixed diffraction background signal without attenuating the modulated diffraction signal. The device was fabricated with a pixel density of five hundred pixels per inch with beams deflectable up to four degrees. The optics employed a 150 watt xenon arc lamp, reflective schlieren optics and a 2.5 by 3.5 foot screen with a gain of five. Four hundred TV lines of resolution were demonstrated with a screen brightness of thirty-five foot-lumens, a contrast ratio of fifteen to one, and a beam diffraction efficiency of forty-eight percent. Write times of less than 1/30 second were achieved and erase times were as short as 1/10 of the write time. However, the device has problems, including degradation of resolution from scanning errors, poor manufacturing yield, and no advantage over conventional projection cathode ray tubes. That is, the scan-to-scan positioning accuracy is not high enough to reproducibly write on individual pixels. The resulting loss of resolution forces at least a four fold increase in the number of pixels required to maintain the same resolution compared to comparably written phosphor. Also, the device yield is limited by the lack of an etch stop for the cloverleaf support post, the wet etching of the beams leading to beam breakage, and the need to evaporate normally tensile aluminum in a state of zero stress on the oxide beams. Further, the device offers no apparent cost or performance advantage over conventional projection CRTs.
Cantilever beam deformable mirrors integrated on silicon with addressing circuitry, thus eliminating the electron beam addressing with its high voltage circuitry and vacuum envelopes of the previously described cantilever device, appear in K. Petersen, Micromechanical Light Modulator Array Fabricated on Silicon, 31 Appl. Phys. Lett. 521 (1977) and U.S. Pat. No. 4,229,732. The first of these references describes a 16 by 1 array of diving board-shaped cantilever beams fabricated as follows: an epitaxial layer of (100)-oriented silicon (either p or n) of thickness of about 12 microns is grown on a p+ substrate (or buried layer); the epilayer is oxidized to a thickness of about 0.5 micron and covered with a Cr-Au film of thickness about 500 A. The Cr-Au is etched away to form contact pads and address lines and to define the diving board metallization. The oxide is etched away in a comb pattern around the metallization in a second masking step. Finally, the silicon itself is etched in a solution of ethylenediamine and pyrocatechol at 120 degrees C. If the proper orientation of the mask with respect to the crystalline axes is maintained, the metal-coated oxide diving boards will be undercut by the etch and freed from the silicon. Since the etch is anisotropic, further lateral etching will be stopped by the (111) planes defining the rectangular envelope of the comb pattern. In addition, the etchant is inhibited by p+ material, so the depth of the well beneath the diving boards is defined by the thickness of the epilayer. When a dc voltage is applied between the substrate and the diving board metallization, the thin oxide diving board will be electrostatically deflected downward into the etched well. Diving boards of length 106 microns and width 25 microns showed a threshold voltage of about 66 volts.
The second reference (U.S. Pat. No. 4,229,732) describes devices fabricated in a manner similar to the diving board device (a buried p+ layer as an etch stop for forming the wells underneath metallized silicon dioxide cantilever beams) but has a different architecture; namely, the cantilever beams are in the shape of square flaps hinged at one corner, the flaps form a two dimensional array instead of the one dimensional row of diving boards, and the wells underneath the flaps are not connected so that addressing lines for the flaps may be formed on the top surface of the silicon between the rows and columns of flaps. Of course, the corner hinging of the flaps derives from the cloverleaf architecture of U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,886,310 and 3,896,338, but the full cloverleaf architecture could not be used because this would preclude the surface addressing lines since cloverleaf flaps are hinged to a central post isolated from the silicon surface. Further, these devices have problems including poor resolution and low efficiency due to density limitations and the small fractional active area, low manufacturing yield, degradation of contrast ratio due to diffraction effects from the address circuitry, and residual image due to the charging effects of the oxide flap. More particularly, the addressing circuitry is squeezed around the active area (flaps) because no option exists for placing the address circuitry under the active area due to the wells being formed by etching away the epilayer down to the p+ etch stop. Thus the active area is reduced substantially together with the diffraction efficiency. This means more lamp power is required for the same screen brightness. Because the address circuitry requires additional area, the pixel size is increased far beyond the flap area with a resulting decrease in achievable resolution. The wet etching required to form the wells leads to low electrical and mechanical yield; indeed, wet cleanups, such as after dicing into chips, destroy flaps and diving boards because during the spin-rinse/dry cycle the water trapped under the beam breaks the beam as it is spun from the surface. If the water is instead evaporated from the surface it leaves behind surface residues which can increase surface leakage currents contributing to erratic device operation. Also, the addressing circuitry being on the silicon surface is exposed to the incident light to be modulated and creates unwanted diffraction effects from the transistor gates plus lowers the contrast ratio. In addition, light leakage into the address structure produces photogenerated charge and reduces storage time. Lastly, the oxide/metal flap has the insulating side facing the well and will charge up due to the intense electric fields which exist across the well; this produces a residual ("burn-in") image. The AC drive required to eliminate this residual image problem cannot be supplied by the NMOS drive circuitry described. Further, if the flap is deflected past the maximum stable deflection, then it will collapse and stick to the bottom of the well. Thus, voltages over the collapse voltage must be absolutely avoided.
A variation of the cantilever beam approach appears in K. Petersen, Silicon Torsional Scanning Mirror, 24 IBM J. Res. Devp. 631 (1980) and M. Cadman et al, New Micromechanical Display Using Thin Metallic Films, 4 IEEE Elec. Dev. Lett. 3 (1983). This approach forms metallic flaps which are connected to the surrounding reflective surface at two opposed corners and operate by twisting the flaps along the axes formed by the connections. The flaps (torsion beams) are not formed monolithically with the underlying addressing substrate, but are glued to it in a manner analogous to the deformable membrane devices mentioned above.
More recent versions of the cantilever beam and torsion beam approach appear in Hornbeck, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,566,935, 4,710,732, 4,596,992, 4,615,595, and 4,662,746.
J. M. Florence et al, Operation of a Deformable Mirror Device as a Fourier Plane Phase Modulating Filter, 938 Proc. SPIE 1 (April 1988), discusses the use of SLMs for phase-only filtering operations for image correlation. However, the known membrane, cantilever beam and torsion beam SLMs when used for phase modulation have problems including amplitude change due to the change in direction of light after reflection, poor optical efficiency, and non-active background reflection.
Micromechanical devices in silicon such as vibration sensors and microvalves have been fabricated in the form of a disk suspended by two spiral arms; see Electronics/May 17, 1984 at pages 83-84 reporting on work done at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solid State Technology.